Another use for ldap--comments?

[John Lederer <johnl@ibm.net>]

Legal cases have citations to identify them.  There may be one, two or three citations for a case, e.g. a case called Smith v. Jones in the Wisconsin Supreme Court might be cited as:

2000 WI 12  (meaning the 12th opinion issued by teh court in 2000)
314 NW2d 23 (menaing the case is found in the 314th volume of the NorthWest reporter, second series, at page 23)

354 Wis2d 26 (same as above except the reporter is the Wisconsin reporter)


Increasingly cases are becoming available for free from non-profit web sites.

When one publishes case law on the web, one would like to make cases cited in a case "clickable" so that the reader can click on a cite to see the case cited.

What a group of us would like to do is to create a worldwide LDAP server than can resolve  a case cite to a URL where that case can be found. In other words one might send 2000 WI 16 to the server and have the server return http://www.wisbar.org/Wis3/99-2810.htm, the URL for the case.

The question I am seeking advice on is how to handle the parallel cites.  There are three different cites for the case.  I would like to be able to input any of the three, get the URL, and the other two parallel citations for the case (In Wisconsin's case there are three parallel cites, but this is worlddwide and there might be none or 5).

What schema would best handle this multiple name for the same thing problem-- keeping in mind that I want to return all three cites.?

Thanks for any advice.

John Lederer